As we progress with ramping up the Open Social Innovation project we travel around the world gathering support and collaborators. From the west coast of the US where we visited friends at Google and X to the far-east where we meet with the most innovative organizations doing good.

When life happens

My work on Dev4X was put at a lower priority for a few months, , here is why:

My daughter, Lorelei, was diagnosed with Acute Flaccid Myelitis a rare polio-like syndrome and lost the use of her arm. Traditional treatments would have given her about a 5% chance at recovery, and state of the art treatments were too costly. Without any experience, we decided to tackle this challenge by setting up an open project and reaching out to experts for help.

We have now built a robotic assistive arm that is helping her move and which has increased her chances of rehabilitation. Over the last several weeks she has now slowly started to regain the use of her arm and is able to move!

As you may have read in our previous post, Mirum wanted to do something impactful. So they asked their clients to vote for their favorite early-stage charity, promising to put their Mirum24 maker teams into action to help the chosen charity reach their goals. They chose our project and this is a post about selecting the finalists in this #Mirum24 project.

Mirum Agency, a digital agency under JWT, selected our non-profit as the focus of their #Mirum24 project an idea-thon in which 15 global Mirum teams are competing to help us further our efforts to provide education to the most underserved children.

Providing Skills

This past holiday season, Mirum ran a Holiday Campaign and invited their clients to vote for an inspiring nonprofit. The purpose: to put their Mirum24 hacker teams to work solving a difficult global challenge. 15 teams came together and generated some amazing ideas. Read more here.

This past holiday season, Mirum ran a Holiday Campaign and invited their clients to vote for an inspiring nonprofit. The purpose: to put their Mirum24 hacker teams to work solving a difficult global challenge.

Inspired by Minecraft and Loombands as self organised learning environments (SOLE), a gamification strategy was developed by Natalie Denmeade to encourage pre-literacy skills in young children. A first step in this framework is to use comic strips (aka graphic novels) to associate letters as codes for sounds.

In part one, I spoke about my concerns regarding sending my children to school and why they are unable to adequately prepare our children for the future. I also shared a little about what I am doing about this issue. In part two I want to talk a little more about our approach and why it’s important to disrupt traditional education without disrupting actual learning.

Here are three stories from Tanzania showing the real passion and drive that spurs people forward. It is this passion and drive we are looking to empower and grow by providing them tools that they can use to more fully take their learning into their own hands from a young age.